Kristian Prenga's manager has downplayed talk of foul play in the Albanian's defeat to Anthony Joshua, but claims his star client was ill two weeks before the Saudi showdown. Joshua was back in action this past weekend for the first time since being involved in a tragic car crash. A win in Jeddah for the former two-time heavyweight champion would finally earn him a date with Tyson Fury. However, 'AJ' nearly saw that fight snatched away after he was dropped twice in the opening round by Prenga, before rallying back in the second to stop his Albanian rival.
Manager Denies Conspiracy Theories
Fans immediately started to scratch their heads as Prenga looked a completely different fighter in the second round. There have since been whispers of outside influences, but Prenga's manager Keith Sullivan has denied all the conspiracy theories. Speaking to talkSPORT, presenter Ade Oladipo asked Sullivan to address the theories. Sullivan answered: 'We can clear those up very easily in one word, impossible. There were two conspiracies. One was that Turki (Alalshikh) had come over to our corner... You were there, Ade, Turki was not even in Jeddah, so that never happened. That's gone, throw it away. The other conspiracy was that somebody from Sela or Matchroom had come and whispered in our corner. Look at the footage, that never happened.'
Prenga's Illness Revealed
Sullivan then made a stunning revelation that Prenga was ill and unable to spar in the weeks leading up to the fight. 'But, what happened here was Kristian had gotten very sick leading up to the fight. He didn't spar or train for two weeks before he got to Jeddah,' he continued. 'He had a 102 (degrees Fahrenheit) fever and he was in bed for eight days straight... he moved camp over to Dubai, he brought a doctor in, drew some blood to make sure there wasn't something more serious going on. They said he was just run down and they thought it was a flu or cold, or something, and he would get over it. It took 14 days, so we had the last seven days before we went to Jeddah for training. We had a sparring partner there in Dubai who we didn't use at all... we couldn't get him out of bed to go for a walk.'
In the first round, Prenga gassed himself out. The instructions for the second round were to continue pressuring. Sullivan said: 'Kristian stood up off the stool to start, when that bell rang for the second round, and he said to me he felt like he was back in that bed that he was in for eight days, when he was gasping for air and had no energy.' He concluded: 'But, there was no... again, I'm not making excuses, I think it was the most exciting five-and-a-half minutes of boxing that I've witnessed in a very long time.'
